White Lines in Rose City

a story by J. Aaron Courts

White Lines. Private Collection, 2025.

There’s a bit of Old Highway 90, in Rose City, Texas, that curls around Bairds Bayou like a snake and stretches beyond Rose City Hall, where my grandmother rapped her gavel, and farther still, past Rose City Baptist Church, where my great-grandmother prayed. It’s necessary sometimes to swerve around slow-moving redneck turtles, with their green and black shells, as they scurry from ditch to ditch, or dodge greasy remains that mark a buzzard’s feast—squished coons, cracked turtles, and once a small alligator. A stretch of the highway, or more accurately, a ramp from the old highway onto the new interstate, doesn’t exist anymore. But on a dark Southeast Texas night in 1988 it did, and I was there, crouching in the back seat of my mother’s Camaro, howling at an absent moon like a blind wolf and surfing the road’s dips and drops while my mother hung her head out the window and howled like a wolf too. And mosquitoes were there. And a man driving a black truck directly in front of us. And there was a teenage boy—two, in fact. Both walking up the same ramp. The last ramp before crossing the Neches and leaving Rose City. One boy walked along the edge of the road, where the black asphalt crumbled into grass, and the other along the white painted line. Maybe it should have been yellow.

The inside of my mother’s car glowed red, and I looked up. Her arm shot into the back seat and her nails stabbed me. The black truck didn’t stop at first—it barely slowed. It was a shimmy really, and a cloud of dust and grit was churned before us. We shimmied too, and I wiped out in the back seat with fresh scratches across my chest. The black truck pulled off the ramp near the merge, but we slammed on the brakes and came to a stop just beyond the cloud.

Tractor trailers zoomed along the interstate above us to the left and dragged the cloud around my mother’s car and then left it to hang over something. Our headlights cut golden rays through the swirling dust and into black night and illuminated the thing—a crumpled body. A boy. The white-line boy.

He couldn’t have been thrown far from where he was struck because we stopped only a few feet from his body. Maybe the truck had run clean over him; I don’t know. Mother put the hazards on so no one would smash into us and angled the car half off the road so the ramp couldn’t be used. It was an unnecessary precaution. The black truck, the boys, and Mother and me were the only ones on Old Highway 90 that night.

“Don’t look! Aaron, don’t look,” my mother said, panicked, as she opened the door and ran to the boy, but everything was lit clearly in front of the Camaro’s long hood.

His friend, a large kid the size of a grown man, who’d missed being struck himself by only a friend’s width, kept trying to pick him up—make his friend stand—but could not. His own shock and the boy’s limp body made it impossible. In the end all he’d been able to do for his friend was hoist him waist high and then drop him onto the ground over and over again. My mother managed to stop the distraught kid from jerking his friend’s body, and he stepped out of the golden light and into the darkness. I didn’t see him again.

The last drop had left the struck boy’s waist and legs twisted on the ramp, but his torso and arms were sprawled in the grass. He lay perfectly still, and steam rose from some open parts of him and some, like his grey-socked feet, that were not. He was shoeless, though they must have been somewhere in the grass, steaming themselves I suppose. He had jeans on and an olive drab bomber jacket and both were dark, almost black, with wet. The man who drove the truck was crying, “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see him,” while my mother alternated between chest compressions and blowing air into the boy’s lungs through half a head and a strange, bulged neck.

His half-head appeared half-buried like a kid playing in the sand at Crystal Beach. But there was no sand. There was no beach. It was just that the back of his head was crushed. My mother stopped after some time and began to sob. She turned and began to scream. I hadn’t listened, and she saw my face, perched above the dash, staring down mesmerized with curiosity.

I often hunted with my grandfather and helped him gut the deer he’d shot, and once, cleaned bone fragments and bits of teeth from the meat after a head shot exploded the skull. This was much the same. A boy’s skull—a man’s—fares no better than a deer’s when you’re walking white lines at night in Rose City.

Now, when occasion calls me home, I drive the old highway, along its windings and curves, past the city hall and the church. And I pass a spot that used to be a ramp, where a truck struck a boy once, and I watched him die. I can see him lying there, still see his blood on my mother’s mouth, and his friend slip into the black night. And I wonder if he ever came back—ever comes back—to find his friend’s shoes.

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Editorial note: This is a work of fiction or, more accurately, a work of auto-fiction that originated as a creative nonfiction. Early drafts were based entirely from my memory. I was in a vehicle with my mother in 1988. We were following another vehicle that struck one of two boys walking along the white lines of Old Highway 90 in Rose City, Texas. And that boy was, in fact, killed. My mother tried to help him, but his injuries were too great, and the boy died right there as we watched.

When I asked my mother to confirm a few details it became clear that our memories were different, as is common even between people present at the same event. But I was six and she was not. I have no doubt her memory is more factually accurate than my own. Still, my memory is, well, how I remember it.

I could have revised the piece to be more in line with my mother’s telling—less story and more account—but that felt disingenuous somehow. So, I have kept elements of my memory largely intact and adapted, or invented, other elements to capture the truth of this story. It is fiction, not entirely factual, but it is also true. True to itself, and a six-year-old’s experience a long time ago. Semper Fidelis.